For most of the 20th century the raison d'etre of the parties of the democratic left, whether the Labour party, the SPD or the American Democrats, has been to provide a critique of capitalism and to protect the most vulnerable from its depredations. So with the great crisis of capitalism that we have been living through one would expect the left both to be providing a convincing account of what has been going wrong and to be benefiting electorally as voters show their disillusionment with the parties of the pro-capitalist right.

Neither of these things seem to have been happening, and it was the task of our panel to explain why. In Germany the SPD did disastrously in the recent German elections and has been booted out of chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition. In the UK, the Labour party seems heading for a severe defeat at the hands of the Conservatives. In the US, hopes that the Obama administration would take on Wall Street with the vigour of Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt are fading away; and the French socialists are nowhere to be seen.

Our panel was refreshingly divided on the causes of the left's disarray and on whether it was in fact in disarray at all. Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian made the contrarian argument that, provided one was not too dogmatic about what the left is, the forces of progress are not in bad shape at all. He cited the move to the centre by David Cameron and his Conservative party; the Obama administration's ambitious project to reform US healthcare for the benefit of lower income Americans; and the success of Oskar Lafontaine's Left party in the German elections, even if it was at the expense of the SPD.

But our other two panellists, Marc Stears of the politics department at Oxford, and Godfrey Hodgson, the veteran former US correspondent of the Sunday Times and the Observer, were less sanguine about the left's performance. Stears saw the left as severely compromised by its failure to provide a convincing account of what was wrong with the system, and Hodgson saw the left as having lost sight of its primary concern with the world of production; of working people and the poor; and of the need to renew its ideas in the light of globalisation and of technological change.